The reap that keeps departed virtual monitors from exhausting the IddCx
monitor-slot budget launched pnputil by BARE NAME — under the LocalSystem
service's PATH that can miss System32, SilentlyContinue swallowed the
miss, and the Rust side logged only when the count was positive: a reap
that removed nothing and a box with no ghosts were byte-identical
(silence). Ghosts then ratcheted up with every sleep cycle until
IOCTL_ADD wedged at 0x80070490 and every session black-screened — and
the wedge self-heal shipped in 0.25.0 retried an ADD behind a reap that
could never remove anything, which is exactly a persistent post-sleep
"no connection" surviving the b6acbd09 probe fix.
Same family and same cure as the adapter-reload path one function down:
resolve pnputil via $env:SystemRoot (a SYSTEM process must not trust
PATH anyway — a planted pnputil.exe would run elevated), pre-seed
$LASTEXITCODE to failure before every launch, and report found AND
removed unconditionally so "no ghosts" and "removed nothing" are
finally distinguishable in a field log. The report parse is split out
and pinned by tests like classify_reload_output.
enricobuehler
975fef2048